Mapplethorpe returns to Cincinnati

Aesthetics aren’t absolute.

At least without activism, said photographer Andres Serrano.

“That’s the mark of a good artist,” Serrano said. “Pretty pictures that have some sort of social significance.”

New York-based Serrano sees that mark in Robert Mapplethorpe’s work.  That’s one of the reasons he will be a part of the opening celebration for “After the Moment: Reflections on Robert Mapplethorpe” at 7 p.m. Friday at the Contemporary Arts Center.

The event will also include a performance piece responding to Mapplethorpe by Cincinnati’s Near*By Curatorial Collective, blending dance, spoken word and radical theater.

“After the Moment” opens 25 years after the Cincinnati stop of the late photographer’s controversial exhibition triggered events that forever shaped our ideas on art, pornography and freedom of expression.

Before “The Perfect Moment” opened in April 1990, CAC art director Dennis Barrie and the CAC were charged criminally for obscenity.

It was the first and only time a museum and a director faced such charges in the United States. And a jury acquitted the Barrie and the museum.

“I didn’t follow the trial,” Serrano said. “I couldn’t help but hear about it.”

“After the Moment” features photographs from Mapplethorpe, who died in 1989, and some of his contemporaries. One Mapplethorpe work: “Man in Polyester Suit” auctioned at Sotheby’s New York for $478,000 earlier this year.

Historical work from Sally Mann and Joel-Peter Witkin will also be included in the show. According to the CAC, Mann and Witkin were Mapplethorpe contemporaries who “felt they could not show their work in Cincinnati in 1990, due to the tumultuous environment surrounding the obscenity trial.”

Serrano will focus his talk Friday on his own provocative work which is often mentioned in the same breath as Mapplethorpe.

“I think there was a moment when Mapplethorpe and myself were a lightning rod for the right to rally against,” he said.

His moment came with “Piss Christ,” a 1987 photograph featuring a crucifix in a glass of the artist's urine. It was part of a National Endowment for the Arts supported competition at the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

Critics, especially conservative members of Congress, blasted the NEA, a U.S. government agency, for supporting Serrano's work, much like they did for the agency's support of Mapplethorpe’s “A Perfect Moment.”

“I feel like ever since I have been known as controversial,” said Serrano, who is Christian and Catholic. “Many people especially outside of the art world have heard of ‘Piss Christ.' And many of them think it is something that they can’t understand or something that is sacrilegious.”

Ultimately, “After the Moment” focuses on Mapplethorpe’s legacy and how the culture wars that erupted in Cincinnati altered the contemporary arts landscape. The CAC worked with six curators from Ohio, Kentucky and Indiana, with each choosing five artists to create new work. Each artist was charged with exploring what both Mapplethorpe and the trial meant to them.

What does Serrano think of Mapplethorpe?

“I like Robert’s work because he is a great photographer and artist,” he said. “And I feel his eye is impeccable. … He brings that aesthetic to subjects that may be considered controversial, at least they were at the time.”

The show will be up at the Downtown institution through March 13. For more, visit www.contemporaryartscenter.org.